There, those are the woods behind the house. Before you settled into your pose, you looked behind you to see deeply, and try and find the edge, the other side. The trees went on forever, naked, white, and staring. You look and you looked.

Here you are five and she is six. You are twenty-five and she is twenty-six. You have four children. Here she loves you; she protects you. Like a mindless brother.

You watched her hands, and walked inside them as they traveled and touched the world.

It’s 11.54p.m. where I’m at, and I’m only beginning to find time to do my own work, so let me leave you with something on my playlist. Here’s some Mount Eerie from the latest album Clear Moon. [via YouTube]

On a side note, I’ve been receiving lots of books but haven’t found the space and/or time to do a proper Edition Additions post. I’ll do one again soon.

“… the short sentence is artificial – we use almost never short sentences, we make pause, or we hold on a part of a sentence end …” he reaches for it with his left hand as it passes “… but this characteristic, very classical, short sentence – at the end with a dot – this is artificial, this is only a custom, this is perhaps helpful for the reader, but for only one reason, that the readers in the last few thousand years have learned that a short sentence is easier to understand, this is also a custom, but if you think, you almost never use short sentences, if you listen …”

For much of his life, Marker functioned as a foreign correspondent, a romantic leftist in the Malraux mode travelling the world from West Africa to Siberia. Most of his early films were personal travelogues—short features notable for their wry, poetic voiceover narration and serendipitous approach to foreign societies. “Modern adventure, Marker understands, is not updating lost paradises, but discovering new places,” observed Cahiers du Cinéma critic Andre S. Labarthe in 1961. “No longer the Indies, but Communist China, no longer the Amazon, but Cuba, no longer Palestine, but Israel.” Today one might call these places failed utopias—or, perhaps, in a more Markerian formulation, places haunted by their lost futures.

Certainly, the very premise of such a poll suggests that one should probably look at it with a healthy dose of scepticism, but I found Pitchfork’s top albums of 1996-2011 largely predictable but interesting in minor places. [via Pitchfork]

Our next contact occurred a month later: a two-hour phone call whose pretext was the clarification of certain passages in The Laurels, in effect a chance to start knowing one another. At the end of our conversation I painfully learned how deep I had already been drawn into Marie’s world: she mentioned that her next book was an account of her mother’s life as seen from the moment of her death. This death had not been mentioned in The Laurels. I was incredulous—I had longed to meet Marie’s mother. After we hung up, I immediately fell prey to the worst migraine headache of my life, spending four hours lying on my bed in darkness and pain, from which I finally emerged as soon as I realized I was indulging in “unjustified mourning”—a passion of love and grief for someone I had never even met.

Man, is it that time of the year again? Apparently, this year’s favourite in the betting market for the Nobel Prize for Literature is Haruki Murakami. (And I do not advocate gambling, children.) [via the Guardian] So it is time to play that game again.

So, in the spirit of playing along (as I tend to do), I will again allow myself five guesses. This year, I’m putting my non-existent money on 残雪, Cormac McCarthy, Nicanor Parra, László Krasznahorkai, and… Javier Marías.